Communities of experts can, through strategic action, have a large influence on the actions of powerful institutions.
Alfred Adler’s The emergence of cooperation: national epistemic communities and the international evolution of the idea of arms control talks about how a community of scientists and strategists (in many ways similar to the EA community) played a key role in creating the ideas that led to nuclear arms control agreements. The article is a bit long; I’d recommend reading the first couple of paragraphs, then skipping to the section “Intellectual innovation” (page 111).
Other relevant writing on epistemic communities
Robinson on the CERN community and cooperation between countries.
Kerry Vaughan’s post on how, through the strategic actions of an intellectual community, neoliberalism went from a marginalized movement to the dominant influence in economics.
Scott Alexanders’ review of Edward Pease’s The History Of The Fabian Society.
I previously drew on Adler’s work to derive lessons for (military) AI governance, in: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13523260.2019.1576464